IN­DE­PEN­DENCE DAY: RESUR­GENCE

Twenty years on, get ready for the re­match…

Two decades af­ter aliens nuked the White House in Roland Em­merich’s block­bust­ing In­de­pen­dence Day, they’re preparing a sec­ond as­sault on planet Earth in In­de­pen­dence Day: Resur­gence. Orig­i­nally de­vel­oped by Em­merich and co-writer Dean Devlin back in 2004, it’s taken the duo over a decade to kick the script into shape – but what they’ve come up with sounds huge.

“We’re ready with a big­ger punch and big­ger shields,” says Jeff Gold­blum, re­turn­ing as uber-bof­fin David Levin­son, who’s now head of planet-pro­tect­ing pro­gramme Earth Space De­fense. “The tech­nol­ogy we found from the downed alien ships has been mar­ried with ours,” he adds, so ESD has, pos­si­bly, even colonised the Moon.

Also dif­fer­ent: Will Smith opted out of more ET-bash­ing, but his char­ac­ter’s son, Dy­lan, is back, played by new­comer Jessie Usher. “Dy­lan grew up in the world his dad saved,” says Usher, “so you can imag­ine what be­ing the son of the world saviour is like.” With re­turnees Vivica A Fox, Bill Pull­man and Brent Spiner joined by new­bies Liam Hemsworth and Maika Mon­roe, big­ger really is bet­ter where the cast’s con­cerned. “The scope of this film is much big­ger than the last one,” con­firms Hemsworth. Get ready to rum­ble... Josh Win­ning